January 07, 2016

NATO’s disastrous legacy in Libya

There is almost an air of desperation in the
recent unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2259 that seeks to
bring together a critical mass of Libyan factions and actors to support a
new unity government of national accord that will oversee a peace process.

Libya’s new Presidency Council will form a government within
30 days of the UN resolution, and the resolution stipulates that this
government will be the only authority recognized as sovereign by other states,
but with no consequences for states that ignore that stipulation. Currently, in
addition to the myriad militias and warlord factions in Libya, there are two
rival “governments” in Libya, the House of Representatives based in Tobruk, and
the General National Congress (GNC) in Tripoli.

The UN itself has been widely discredited following the
revelation of emails proving that the UN’s special envoy to Libya until
November, Bernadino Leon, had been effectively working as
an agent of the UAE, and far from being an honest broker, was following the
UAE’s agenda seeking to promote the House of Representatives and delegitimize
the GNC. Since he left his UN post he has been appointed to a highly
remunerated position in UAE.

The situation in Libya is beyond catastrophic. For example, Abdul Hakeam Al-Yamany reports how in the Eastern
city of Benghazi the health service faces complete collapse, with 60% of the
hospitals completely closed, and the remaining health centres unable to meet
even the basic needs of the population. Benghazi Medical Center, with only 260
beds, is now the only hospital serving a metropolitan district of 1.1 million
people.

“The security situation is now even worse than what we saw
during the Libyan Revolution four years ago,” said Leon Tombo, a Philippine
national and a nurse in the emergency room of the Benghazi Medical Center, in
May 2015. He added, “I will resign at the end of this month, and many of my
colleagues have already left. We are no longer safe inside the hospital; bombs
and bullets are hitting the building, and a number of my colleagues have been
injured in these attacks.”

In another report Al-Yamany, describes how the education
sector has collapsed.

Over a year ago, on May 16, 2014, General Khalifa Haftar
launched the so-called Operation Dignity against extremist militias in
Benghazi. Since that time, the city has been engulfed in an armed battle that
has ravaged its infrastructure, destroyed most of its institutions, and led to
the displacement of entire neighborhoods of the city. The crisis has
particularly affected the education sector in Benghazi. Only 60 of the 400
schools in the city escaped damage and are able to accept students. … …

Mohammed al-Barghathi, a 12-year-old from the [Banina
neighborhood, which has largely been destroyed], added, “My friends and I tried
to clean our school multiple times so that it could be used for education, but
the random shelling continues to fall on our region. Three of my friends died
when they stepped on an unexploded shell hidden in the school yard.”

Meanwhile, the schools in safer neighborhoods have mostly
been transformed into shelters for internally displaced persons who have left
their homes in nearby areas of conflict. The Benghazi Crisis Committee is
trying hard to develop solutions to displaced persons using the schools as
temporary housing until the war ends in the city. Essam al-Hamali, the official
in charge of social affairs in the Benghazi Crisis Committee, said, “We have
13,000 displaced families in Benghazi. We have temporarily placed them in
schools located in relatively safe areas, because we have no other place to
house them.”

General Khalifa Hifter is a onetime confidante of Muammar
el-Qaddafi, now turned warlord leader, who is waging war on the Jihadis in
Benghazi. The conflict has taken on the aspect of a war economy typical of
failed states, where armed conflict has “destroyed the local legitimate economy
so that many people have no other source of income except through joining
an armed group, and in which access to resources depends on violence”

Many of the pro-Hifter forces — their leaders say anywhere
from 40 to 80 percent — are in fact neighborhood militias. The struggle in some
areas has taken on a vicious familial and even ethnic quality, marked by the
settling of ancient scores, between the east’s Bedouin Arab tribes and families
from western Libya, some of whom have distant ties to Turkey. “This is about
fighting the Turks and Freemasons,” the leader of one tribal militia told me.
Another described children as young as 14 or 15 fighting in his ranks. I heard
stories of summary executions of prisoners, forcible eviction of families and
destruction of property.

Ultraconservative Salafists are said to be among the most
competent fighters in General Hifter’s ranks; they too fight out of local and
sometimes tribal solidarity, confounding the notion that this is a purely
ideological war between secularists and Islamists.

On the other side, the composition is equally murky. To be
sure, the Islamic State is present and growing. But one military critic of
General Hifter, who wishes to remain anonymous, estimates that many of the
opposing fighters are not hardened jihadists, but youths from Benghazi’s
marginalized families who got caught up with Islamist militias and are now
looking for a way to stop fighting.

Armed groups on all sides of the conflict have disregarded
civilians and committed violations of international human rights and
humanitarian law, and violations and abuses of human rights, including
abductions, extrajudicial executions, unlawful killings, torture and other
ill-treatment. Armed groups have targeted Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) seeking
to document and denounce such violations and abuses. Moderates who have
supported the UN-facilitated efforts for a ceasefire and political dialogue
have also been targeted by armed groups. … …

A series of savage attacks by extremists took place during
the reporting period. In January at least 9 people, including 5 foreign
nationals, were killed in a terrorist attack on an international hotel in
Tripoli. In February, ISIL-affiliated terrorists claimed responsibility for the
abduction and beheadings of 21 Coptic Christians, prompting retaliatory air
strikes on Dernah by Egypt. In February, nine were killed in an attack at
Mabruk oilfield southeast of Sirte, and three oil workers were kidnapped. On 6
March, terrorists killed eight oil workers and kidnapped nine workers at Al
Ghani oilfield, south east of Tripoli. Car bomb attacks in public areas in
Tripoli, Tobruk and Benghazi caused many casualties. In April 2015, two groups
of Ethiopian Christians were executed by ISIL in Libya in two locations. … …

The UN, NGOs, and the media reported summary executions by a
Sharia “court” in Dernah, and killings of security officials and current and
former civil servants including judges, HRDs, media workers, and a female member
of the General National Congress. …

Armed militias, mostly from Misrata, continued to prevent
about 40,000 residents of Tawergha, Tomina, and Karareem from returning to
their homes as a form of collective punishment for crimes allegedly committed
by some Tawergha residents during the 2011 revolution. Those displaced
continued to seek safety and shelter in makeshift camps and private housing in
many areas, but they remained subject to attack, harassment, and arbitrary
detention by the militias … …

The condition of prisons and treatment of prisoners under
the jurisdiction of the different sides in the conflict remained a serious
concern throughout this period. HRDs continued to report arbitrary detentions,
mistreatment, torture and extrajudicial killings in detention centres on all
sides.

Libya has, since 2011, suffered a collapse of civic
infrastructure, with the health and education sectors decimated, with the
productive, peacetime economy replaced by brigandage, and with a catastrophic
collapse of womens’ rights. The rule of law has completely collapsed, with all
parties in Libya refusing to cooperate with jurisdiction of tthe International
Criminal Court: for example, the trial that resulted in the death sentence for
Saif Islam Gaddafi was held in absentia as he himself is rotting in a
extra-judicial militia run prison, and no prosecution evidence was presented,
the court moved straight to judgement. Even by 2012 the UN was reporting

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay … raised concerns
about detainees being held by revolutionary forces, saying there were some
8,500 prisoners in about 60 centres.

“The majority of detainees are accused of being Gaddafi
loyalists and include a large number of sub-saharan, African nationals,” she
said. “The lack of oversight by the central authority creates an environment
conducive to torture and ill treatment”

What is therefore odd, is that supporters of the NATO
intervention which destroyed the Libyan state don’t accept that the adventure
was misjudged.

In October 2011, Seumus Milne described in the Guardian how the
NATO intervention had been a disaster. I refer to Milne as he has become a bête
noir of the pro-war lobby.

In Milne’s view, without Nato’s support, Gaddafi would have
entered Benghazi, murdered a few thousand people and order would have been
restored. In actuality, without Western support, Libya either would have
endured a much longer and more brutal civil war (with a much stronger chance
that the most violent rebels would win out), or else it would have finished
with Gaddafi still in power, only now forced to use far more repressive
measures to maintain his grip. …

It is absolutely in the West’s interests to overthrow
despotic, disgusting regimes like those of Gaddafi, and to encourage more
pluralistic, liberal ones in their place. It is also good for those people, who
now have a chance to build a better society.

Already when Knowles wrote this, the promise of a “better
society”, was a macabre insult to the tens of thousands of lives broken by a
society teetering on the abyss, as the state was destroyed and rival militias
fought over the spoils. It has become a lazy caricature of those seeking to hold to
account the folly of British military misadventures that this is due to knee
jerk “anti-imperialism”, but perhaps as a Conservative Knowles might reflect on
the wisdom of Edmund Burke in his reflections on the French Revolution.

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do
what they please. We ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk
congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would
dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty when
men act in bodies is power. Considerate people before they
declare themselves will observe the use which is made of power; and
particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons,
of whose principles, tempers and dispositions, they have little or no
experience.

I was in Libya as Colonel Gaddafi very deliberately fostered
a refugee crisis in which thousands of people died on ghost transports, on
buses and on trucks that couldn’t take the strain of their carriage. Gaddafi
was opening up passes to Africa’s south in a great scheme to blackmail the EU.
I was there as the migrants died of thirst. But really they died of a
vindictive, bloody blackmailing policy. They died because of Gaddafi.

The Gaddafi regime fell in weeks – as it were always going
to fall. Within three days of the start of anti-government protests, the
opposition were in charge of the country’s second capital, Benghazi. Six weeks
and UN Security Council Resolution 1973 had been adopted, a no-fly zone was in
place, and a coalition of 27 states from Europe and the Middle East sent in strikes
against pro-government forces.

Six months after the start of protests and Tripoli fell.
Gaddafi died, and Libya disintegrated into areas under control by separate
more-or-less Islamist militias. And this is more-or-less where Libya remains.

Why?

Because Libya was never a cohesive country. It was, and is,
barely a country at all but a scattering of six million people in a vast
desert, with almost all of them concentrated in a thin coastal strip. The
capital, Tripoli sits at the top left, the second city – and virtually the
second capital – Benghazi, at the top right. With the exception of that coastal
strip, the rest is sand, and one-Toyota towns.

During Gaddafi’s day the powerful kept an occasional politic
presence in Tripoli and dwelt in their tribal areas and in loathing. The moment
they had the opportunity to go after Gaddafi, they went after him. Given the
intensity of feeling, the three days to take Benghazi looks restrained.

There was no depth to the Libyan state. The only question
was, would the regime have the chance to use their control of the air? … …

People say Libya under Gaddafi worked. It was a police
state. It was a wretched grey murder-state with basic dental. I spent a lot of
time there, and I saw hunger, and fear, and Mukhabarat, and those on the good
days.

At the best of times, Gaddafi’s regime was a stretched and
grubby sticking plaster over a country that didn’t work.

There was no Save the Dictator option, and neither should
there have been.

I lack Ms Godfrey’s talent for divining the opinions of the
population of an entire country.

Nor can I speak for her experience of meeting people in
Libya who were hungry, but according to theUnited Nations Human Development Index (HDI), in
2010 Libya had the highest HDI in the African continent, and in 2012 had a GDP of $US 14000 per capita, equating
to a spending power per head of $11900; the highest standard of living in Africa.
Libya under Gaddafi also had free health care and education, around a quarter
of the population were university educated, and more than half of graduates
were women.

The socio-economic achievements of the regime can be
attributed essentially to the distributive state: that is, the success of the
hydrocarbons sector and of the mechanisms put in place early on to distribute
petrodollars.

The comic opera absurdity of the so-called Socialist
People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, the puppet uniforms, and Gaddafi’s Bedouin
chic did indeed provide a grotesque façade for a state that endorsed and
encouraged terrorism, and brutal internal repression. It was a particularly
absent state, lacking any political party or parties, and while it had a
functioning bureaucracy with some degree of popular participation, it had
neither the culture nor institutions for allowing political differences to be
aired or resolved. We need to understand that the murder, torture and
repression of political opponents is the attribute not of a strong state, but
of a weak state.

The stronger state is one where there is sufficient culture
of respect for the rule of law in civil society; political institutions that
allow the resolution of disputes; and the willingness of governments to
renounce power to their political opponents via constitutional means.
Constitutionality is the hallmark of a state whose sovereignty rests upon
popular consent.

Godfrey’s argument fails on a number of particulars.
Firstly, she fails to distinguish between the stability of the Libyan state,
and the particular expression of the government of that state. Governments and
states are not the same thing, and governments can be changed by political
process while still maintaining states. The military action by NATO in
assistance of the rebels destroyed the state itself, and thereby destroyed the
monopoly of armed force from the state and also the bureaucratic institutions which
allowed the administrative and distributive economic functions of the Libyan
state to function for its population. Even a repressive state plays a public
safety role through excluding other actors from exercising war and brigandage
on its territory.

Security is a top priority. [Tunisia is] a very small
country threatened by al Qaeda from Algeria and [the Islamic State] from Libya
— that’s a huge mess, right? And more than that, one of the keys of success of
Tunisia is that we don’t have Egypt’s military. Ben Ali was a dictator, and he
made the choice to weaken the military, to avoid a military coup. But it’s now
becoming a huge problem. Today the Tunisian military is really unequipped. The
terrorists are very tech-y today, they use social media to organize, so this is
one of the reasons I’m doing this.

But the second reason is that, for human rights activists,
security is a taboo. Security means you are anti-human rights. But that gives
space to those who are not very keen on human rights to take care of this
topic. I think that people from a human rights background should be more
involved in security issues, and stop thinking that security is a taboo. If we
want to defend people’s rights, the first thing we need to defend is their
right to live and not to die. That’s the first step.

Godfrey is blasé about the collapse of the Libyan state,
saying that it was inevitable. It was only inevitable once NATO destroyed the
armed forces defending that state. This created the security vacuum that was
itself a human rights catastrophe greater than any furious dogs of war that
Gaddafi could let slip.

She is also simply wrong that there was not a political
alternative. Arguably the NATO intervention curtailed any prospect of
a process in Libya leading to a stable resolution. It is worth quoting Roberts
at length:

The claim that the ‘international community’ had no choice
but to intervene militarily and that the alternative was to do nothing is
false. An active, practical, non-violent alternative was proposed, and
deliberately rejected. The argument for a no-fly zone and then for a military
intervention employing ‘all necessary measures’ was that only this could stop
the regime’s repression and protect civilians. Yet many argued that the way to
protect civilians was not to intensify the conflict by intervening on one side
or the other, but to end it by securing a ceasefire followed by political
negotiations.

A number of proposals were put forward. The International
Crisis Group, for instance, where I worked at the time, published a statement on
10 March arguing for a two-point initiative: (i) the formation of a contact
group or committee drawn from Libya’s North African neighbours and other
African states with a mandate to broker an immediate ceasefire; (ii)
negotiations between the protagonists to be initiated by the contact group and
aimed at replacing the current regime with a more accountable, representative
and law-abiding government. This proposal was echoed by the African Union and
was consistent with the views of many major non-African states – Russia, China,
Brazil and India, not to mention Germany and Turkey. It was restated by the ICG
in more detail (adding provision for the deployment under a UN mandate of an
international peacekeeping force to secure the ceasefire) in an open letter to
the UN Security Council on 16 March, the eve of the debate which concluded with
the adoption of UNSC Resolution 1973.

In short, before the Security Council voted to approve the
military intervention, a worked-out proposal had been put forward which addressed
the need to protect civilians by seeking a rapid end to the fighting, and set
out the main elements of an orderly transition to a more legitimate form of
government, one that would avoid the danger of an abrupt collapse into anarchy,
with all it might mean for Tunisia’s revolution, the security of Libya’s other
neighbours and the wider region. The imposition of a no-fly zone would be an
act of war: as the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress on 2
March, it required the disabling of Libya’s air defences as an indispensable
preliminary. In authorising this and ‘all necessary measures’, the Security
Council was choosing war when no other policy had even been tried.

The proposal for a cease fire and negotiations could not
allow the absent state model of the jamahiriyya, to survive. The jamahiriyya
lacked the civic institutions and political traditions to engage in
negotiations, and so would have needed to generate them. There is evidence that
the jamahiriyya was reformable, and the compelling impetus of a peace process
would have accelerated support for the reforming current led by
Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, who had been previously praised by among others
Tony Blair, and was well placed to use the crisis to its advantage to create
civic institutions. This option needed to be explored, and powerful voices
within the African Union were urging Gaddafi to participate.

As Hugh Roberts explains:

It was the fashion some years ago in circles close to the
Blair government – in the media, principally, and among academics – to talk up
Saif al-Islam’s commitment to reform and it is the fashion now to heap
opprobrium on him as his awful father’s son. Neither judgment is accurate, both
are self-serving. Saif al-Islam had begun to play a significant and constructive
role in Libyan affairs of state, persuading the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
to end its terrorist campaign in return for the release of LIFG prisoners in
2008, promoting a range of practical reforms and broaching the idea that the
regime should formally recognise the country’s Berbers. While it was always
unrealistic to suppose that he could have remade Libya into a liberal democracy
had he succeeded his father, he certainly recognised the problems of the
Jamahiriyya and the need for substantial reform. The prospect of a reformist
path under Saif was ruled out by [NATO’s intervention].

Paradoxically, because the rebellion arose in the Libyan
context without pre-existing civic and political institutions, the
opposition also needed time to coalesce and develop. The military victory
of NATO not only ruled out reform of the jamahiriyya, but it also ruled out the
opposition going through the process of political evolution and clarification,
the development of institutions, mechanisms of accountablity and self-discipline. The
state was destroyed without anything else to fill the void.

Back in 2014, Thomas Friedman argued in the New York Times that
the wave of global protests – what he calls the “square people” has broadly
been contained at the level of protest.

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a
well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on
protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull
political work that produces real change in government. This is the important
point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology
Policy at Princeton University, who writes that ‘Before the Internet, the
tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to
organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and
strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step,
often to their own detriment.’

It is worth considering how Tunisia became an exception,
again to quote Friedman:

Daniel Brumberg, a democracy expert at Georgetown University
and the United States Institute of Peace, points out that the most successful
Square People in the Arab world, who forged a whole new constitution, are in
Tunisia, which is the Arab country that had “the most robust civil society
institutions — especially a powerful labor union federation, as well as
business, human rights and lawyers associations — that could arbitrate between
the secular and religious factions,” who had come together in the square to
oust Tunisia’s dictator. Tunisia also benefited from an army that stayed out of
politics and the fact that the secular and Islamist forces had a balance of
power, requiring them to be inclusive of one another.

The crucial feature in the development of stable political
institutions is that they have legitimacy based upon popular engagement.
Respect for the rule of law, especially constitutionality, cannot be imposed
from outside; and even the successful German experience was domestically
driven, in conjunction with protracted nation building
support by the occupying powers. Conspicuous successes in conflict
resolution, for example the end of South African Apartheid, or the process
started by the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, have involved long term
commitment from the protagonists themselves to resolve their differences.

Kate Godfey is quite explicit that she believes that those like myself and Seumus Milne who argue that
NATO’s intervention in Libya was a failure are wrong. She therefore presumably
believes it was a success.

It is therefore worth comparing her views with those of Sir
John Sawers, who was Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6,
for five years until November 2014.

“When crisis erupted in Libya, we didn’t feel it right to
sit by as Gaddafi crushed decent Libyans demanding an end to dictatorship.

“But we didn’t want to get embroiled in Libya’s problems by
sending in ground forces. After Gaddafi was ousted, no-one held the ring to
help manage a transition to something better … …

“Libya had no institutions. Who or what would take over? The
answer? Those with the weapons. Result? Growing chaos, exploited by fanatics.”

James Robbins, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent comments
on Sir John’s views as follows:

Most foreign policy analysts seem to agree that the major
Western powers, Britain included, are now caught in a sort of policy no-man’s
land between intervention and non-intervention.

Politicians are trying to satisfy citizens who continue to
expect security and protection, but who also seem increasingly unwilling to
tolerate the sort of defence spending that protection might require, and, more
importantly, the scale of sacrifice in soldiers’ lives which ground combat
inevitably brings.

What Libya got was neither full intervention nor complete
non-intervention, but a sort of limited intervention.

That limited intervention, sanctioned by the UN, led by
David Cameron for Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy for France, was based
on the new-ish doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect”. … …

The huge difficulty with limited intervention, of course, is
the unpredictability of outcomes.

That fickle and unfathomable “law of unintended
consequences” delivered catastrophic results in Libya.

Western policy relied on maintaining the unity of
anti-Gaddafi forces once they had dealt with their shared enemy.

Light-touch Western efforts to help Libyans put aside their
tribal and factional differences forever and embrace power-sharing through
representative government based on national unity, have comprehensively
collapsed.

The doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (RtP) is
certainly not an unchallenged one, and it is viewed by – for example – India,
China and Russia with some skepticism. At the heart of RtP is the concept that
state sovereignty is constrained, and that it can be lawful for another state
to intervene to avoid humanitarian disaster. Certainly, using examples of the
Rwandan genocide, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it is clear that outside military
intervention can be a necessity, though there should be a high threshold of
violence to overcome, an emphasis on caution, the exploration and preference of
non-military options, consensus and shared responsibility through the UNSC, the
involvement and indeed primacy of regional actors, and follow through and civic
and economic capacity building to ensure that the outcome is not a failed
state.

The prime difficulty is that the type of military action
advocated as a success in Libya by Kate Godfrey was one that would almost
inevitably lead to disaster. Whatever the merits of the exercise of RtP in any
particular instance, any resulting military action needs to be integrated in a
workable political system that works towards stable outcomes.

Warfare is a brutal business. Von Clauswitz famously
observed that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Just contemplating
the incongruity of this statement with the modern reality of wars involving warlord polities like ISIL,
and the descent into anarchy, reveals an entire sea change from war as traditionally
understood in Europe as the organized exercise of violence by states in
pursuit of political aims.

The exclusion of non-state actors as legitimate participants
in war derived in Europe from the widespread introduction of firearms, but in
particular through the social codification of laws of war, derived from Huigh
de Groot’s (Grotius) work “The Laws of War and Peace”, that became adopted
across Europe by professional practitioners of war, seeing the mutual benefit
of self restraint. Even from the outset, Grotius’s work was ignored during the
expansion of European powers into the colonies, and was later challenged by the
citizen armies of the Napoleonic era and increasing destructive power of
armaments; but for some extensive period, the exercise of military power was
regarded as deliberately conservative of social stability.

Whereas seventeenth Europe, particularly Germany, had
endured war of the same brutal totality as consumes, for example, modern Syria,
the military historian, Robert O’Connell, observed that the codification
of rules of war meant that “for two centuries these men succeeded in capturing
and integrating the gun into a workable political system”.

What NATO’s intervention into Libya reveals is an exercise
of military might where the means do not match the will; and that was socially
regressive in destroying the institutions of social stability thus destroying
the civic foundations of a peacetime economy. In so doing, it has allowed the
creation of a war economy, where access to economic resources is directly
dependent upon the exercise of violence. Such a breakdown of civil society and
public safety are exactly the conditions into which a warlord polity like ISIL
can advance. Indeed, while other Jihadi actors like Boko Haram are merely
franchise holders of so-called Islamic State (ISIL), according to the UN, ISIL
in Libya is integrated with their confederates in Iraq and Syria.

NATO’s action did not locate itself within a framework of
seeking political stability, and indeed it undermined and forestalled a
political peace process from the African Union. Indeed, contemporary with the
Libyan war, the state of Bahrain unleashed a wave of repression not
dissimilar to that which prompted NATO intervention in Libya. The British
government took precisely the opposite view to that which they took in Libya,
believing that political stability in Bahrain outweighed other considerations,
and that reform could be encouraged through dialogue and engagement.

Military action should never be engaged in unless there are
clear, realizable political objectives, that the risks are considered, where
there are clear exit conditions, and where the consequences of failure as well
as the consequences of success are factored into the decisions. What is more,
embarking on war where the military means and will are insufficient, and are
known to be insufficient at the outset, to ensure that the political objectives
can be met guarantees failure. What is more, any exercise of RtP must ensure
commitment to a political process that emphasizes social stability as an
outcome – destroying states and letting anarchy reign may satisfy the liberal
interventionists, but the left is right to oppose and hold such vanities to
account.